Vacation 2011

We've been back from our 12 day road-trip vacation for 3 days now.  We're both back to work tomorrow, the little munchkin is back to preschool, and the teenager is back to riding full time for the remainder of his summer.  I feel like it was so much longer that we were away.  Probably because I've never actually had a 2-week vacation before.  Usually, we go somewhere for a week but spend 2 of those days on the road.  This trip was mostly road!

July 2-5, we spent driving.  Clovis to Salt Lake City to Casper, Wyoming, to Mount Rushmore, to Worthington, Minnesota, and finally to Bloomington, Minnesota.  While on the road, we made sure to look for license plates from other states.  We racked up a lot of them at Mount Rushmore, but over the course of the entire trip, we got all but 3 states (Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Alabama).  We even spotted plates from 5 Canadian provinces!

While in Minnesota, we saw all my siblings and their spouses and kids (minus a brother-in-law and a nephew); aunts, uncle, and cousins from my dad's side of the family; cousins and an aunt from my mom's side of the family; the town where my mom grew up; the largest boot (Red Wing Shoe Museum); Wisconsin across the Mississippi; Como Park Zoo; and the Mall of America.

On the way home, we went through Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, coming home through Yosemite.  We saw John Wayne's birthplace, which happens to be the same place where a couple of the bridges of Madison County are.  We saw 2 of them.  In Nebraska, we saw a Pony Express station, and in Wyoming, we saw a Lone Tree in the middle of the highway.  We came into Colorado up north through Laramie, Wyoming, and stayed in a ski town where it was about 58 degrees (so nice after the heat and humidity everywhere else on the trip).  In Utah, we stayed with my sister and her family for a night.  In Nevada, we just drove - it's a long way across!

Our last night on the road, we stayed in Reno, then made our way to Lake Tahoe before taking Tioga Road through Yosemite to get home.  We stayed in Staybridge Suites - it was awesome!  Lake Tahoe was beautiful.  The kids and I had never been there, and we had fun on a trail next to the edge, climbing on rocks and watching a parasailer.  The little munchkin got to see snow for the first time on Tioga Road - the road was still closed up until about a month ago, so there is still a lot of snow along the road and in the trees.  As always, Yosemite was amazing.  The falls were roaring down the rock faces, and we enjoyed the views of the valley from the road, stopping at the Tunnel View overlook to see El Cap and Half Dome one last time on the way out. 

We had a wonderful vacation, and survived all that togetherness!  We saw quite a bit of the country that we hadn't seen before, found a few geocaches, and got to meet cousins for the first time.  But, as with all vacations, it was fantastic to get home!